The Walking Dead: Season Two – Episode Three

I doubt many of the people who’ve been playing Telltale’s The Walking Dead series since the beginning would have fathomed young Clementine’s trajectory.

She was just a terrified eight-year-old girl in the first season’s inaugural episode, hiding alone in a treehouse as the living dead combed her neighbourhood looking for fresh meat. A non-playable character, she became the charge of a stranger who, in his wisdom, slowly began preparing her for life in an undead wasteland.

But now in season two, at age 11, she’s developed into an extraordinarily tough young woman, physically and mentally capable of fending for herself. The adults around her almost treat her as one of their own, a valuable member of the group whose opinions and ideas count.

She is deeply admirable.

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But she’s still a kid. And regardless of her seeming resilience to the horrors around her – perpetrated both by the unthinking undead and the cruel and conniving living – everything she’s experienced must have some effect on her.

And it’s in the third episode of the second season that we finally start to see what that effect might be.

Without giving too much away to anyone yet to start playing this season, Clementine and her group have been captured by a megalomaniac by the name of Carver (powerfully and menacingly voiced by the excellent Michael Madsen). They’re prisoners who get put to work doing tasks that help the group survive – loading guns, harvesting food from plants, constructing barricades.

Not surprisingly, they’re planning an escape.

The cast is unusually large this time out. There are more than two dozen speaking characters, including some faces players with good memories will remember from last summer’s season-bridging episode The Walking Dead: 400 Days.

And you can expect several newcomers, too, including Jane – a hardboiled prisoner who keeps mostly to herself – and the kowtowing Reggie, subtly played by Kumail Nanjiani (whose high-pitched, whiny voice will be familiar to fans of HBO’s Silicon Valley, where he fills the role of a relationship-challenged software programmer).

It’s a fine collection of performances, but even with all the new faces the story remains steadily focused on Clementine, who’s put to some of her most difficult challenges yet – and I’m not just talking about her encounters with zombies.

To be sure, there are a few requisite action sequences featuring the series’ trademark quick key taps to escape from or brain attacking undead. And, for better or worse, the writers brought out the franchise’s now slightly stale trope of slopping the guts of the dead on the living in order to disguise their smell.

But this sort of thing has become old hat for Clementine. Much more interesting are her face-offs with the living.

Her group sees her as key to their survival – in more ways than one – and they frequently attempt to win her approval. In several scenes she must decide whose side she’s on, knowing that her decision could mean life or death for both herself and her friends.

But the real juice in this third episode comes in her interactions with the villainous Carver, who unexpectedly sees a mirror reflection of himself in Clementine.

He, perhaps more than anyone else in the compound, wants Clementine on his side. It’s partly because he recognizes her strength and willpower and knows it could be a vital aid to his group’s – indeed, even humanity’s – survival.

But it’s also because he sees in her someone who can make hard decisions. Someone not governed by fear or sentiment. Someone who’s been properly hardened by the world in which she finds herself.

And through the episode’s many story-altering decisions – including one character-defining choice near the end that ranks among the greatest moral dilemmas this terrific series has yet conjured up – players get to help shape and direct Clementine’s evolution.

It’s a bit of a slow-burning episode, front-loaded with character introductions and stage setting. And, disappointingly, it’s another that falls well shy of the two hour mark.

But by the end I was left cursing the long wait for the still-in-production fourth and fifth episodes, which will wrap the game’s second season.

It’s still hard to tell exactly where the story is headed – especially given a couple of shocking deaths in this episode – but I expect that when all is said and done we won’t be thinking about specific events and which side-characters lived or died, but instead Clementine’s compelling arc.

We’re currently waist-deep in formative moments that are determining what sort of survivor and person Clementine is going to become. It’s fascinating stuff.

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